Schizophrenic’s Guide: Coaching…

The Chicago Bears are getting better.

They used to suck very badly, and then they started a rebuild. People complained. The best, most expensive players all got traded or sent home. Draft picks were accumulated. Youth was cultivated. Speed and strength became benchmarks for hiring young talent. The team traded for people with special skills that had struggled at other places, people the Bears might train up and use — Alex Leatherwood, Chase Claypool, and that wide receiver from the Patriots. People got mad when those fliers didn’t work out and those players didn’t work out. The first-year of the rebuild featured a roster created with a staggering amount of dead-cap money and therefore was not a competitive team. It couldn’t be. Signings were made of players who were not marquee names, people who were placeholders until that position could be drafted or addressed in a future free agency spending spree when the Bears had more money. Last year the Bears went 3–14 because the teardown made the team weak, and the opposing teams sensed the weakness. Cynics would say that the team lost ten in a row after trading their best player, Roquan Smith. I suppose that is true. They are trending in the right direction, though.

The new season started, and the arch-rival Packers embarrassed the Bears in the first game of the season. People started to complain. Three more bad losses happened, and the experts listed the Bears as the worst team in the league - even worse than last year. They sucked. People screamed for another rebuild, screamed that this rebuild wasn’t working, screamed that the coach needed to go, that he had lost the locker room, screamed for a new quarterback.

Then the Bears started winning games. They haven’t won very many games, but they have won two games in three weeks and have played much, much better in those games. They are beating teams in the middle-tier of the league now. The Commanders have multiple wins. The Raiders have multiple wins. The Bears beat them, and suddenly the Bears are said to have beaten two bad teams. Well, the Bears beat two teams with multiple wins seven games into the season. They are winning the games they are given by the schedule.

I, Daniel Trump, watch every Chicago Bears game. I think that I have watched every Chicago Bears game — with a few exceptions — for fifteen years or so. I love the team. I’m fascinated by the coach, Matt Eberflus. I don’t know if he is qualified or not. I don’t know if the team will put together a series of wins or if they will continue losing games. Spoiler time — I think that he is going to be all right. He has the team trending upwards. Most people have been arguing for him to be fired. They say he’s unqualified. They don’t like his tactics. He shouldn’t lie about his players. He should tell the truth about his players who are struggling. He needs better defensive schemes. Well, most of that is true, but I also see a coach who is trying very hard and who has coached a team that is working hard and has won two of the last three games. They are getting better, folks. This is a process.

He says all the right things. He emphasizes effort and defense. He wanted to create a 4–3 defense with the traditional Cover-2 elements. When the vanilla Cover-2 didn’t work he tried to disguise his coverages and blitz more with his linebackers and his safeties. That helped the defense to play better and stop the opponent more often. That meant that the coaching helped the team to do better.

I’ve been a Bears fan for a number of bad Bears teams over the years. I’m used to the team losing lots of games. It’s frustrating. I understand. Sports isn’t fiction. Someone has to lose every time there’s a game being played. The Bears, though, don’t need to be 3–14 every year. They were 3–14 last year because it was the first year of a teardown and rebuild, and this year they should be getting better. I think they are. Towards the beginning of the season people got restless because the team started losing.

I was one of those people. Sal and I had several online discussions in which we said that the Bears coaching staff had to go. He and I agreed that the coaches weren’t adapting to the NFL game. They weren’t adjusting coverages to the opposing offenses. The vanilla Cover-2 scheme was getting the defense killed. The opposing offenses were throwing for huge gains all throughout the early portions of the season. The Bears offense, meanwhile, felt out of sorts and ineffective. Justin Fields struggled early.

Then things changed gradually over the last four games. The Bears are 2–2 in those last four games. They have played competitive football in all four of those games. I have seen something I hadn’t seen from a Bears team in a long time: effort. I saw players trying their absolute hardest to improve and do better. I saw Justin Fields throw everything he had into every throw he had. I saw Tyson Bagent — the backup quarterback — play beautifully in reserve when Justin just couldn’t play yesterday. The amount of effort given by the run defense was excellent — the opposing team had very few long runs. Almost every run was held to four yards or less.

I felt so badly for Justin Fields when he lost ten games in a row. He wanted so badly to succeed as a quarterback. Then he won a good game against the Commanders and played well against the Broncos and Vikings but got injured in the Vikings game. In the Vikings game the team struggled against the opposing blitz packages. That’s normal for a team just starting to find its groove. They almost won the game, though, losing a heartbreaker to a late-game interception. They need to learn how to win those one-score games.

Overall the Bears are trending up. They are getting better. I like the coach and the way he has changed up defenses, installed blitz packages, and switched the offense to help his quarterbacks play well. He threw short passes with Bagent and ran a lot and had Justin Fields run the ball and throw down the field — playing to each quarterback’s strengths. The secondary is now healthy and playing better than ever. I want to see the second half of the Bears season.

Thanks, and take care, friends.